Tag Archives: Pulp Fiction Megapack

Death Mates for the Lust-Lost – Hugh J. Gallagher

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pulpfiction0125 stories for $.99; they must be good!  Part V of XXV.

Miriam Daly is on a launch to the island compound of Mr. Martinez.  The passengers are a diverse group including a lecturer, an aerialist, a singer, a dancer, a magician’s assistant, and a concert pianist — all female. There are clearly no rocket scientists in the group as they haven’t figured out they’re all going to the same place despite being on a small boat heading toward an island.

Martinez greets them at his mansion and pulls aside three of the women.  The other three are led to their rooms by a “half-nude” servant, although which half and which sex are not described.

Miriam is led into a bedroom and the door is locked behind her.  Soon there is a tapping at her window.  She opens the latch and lets in the aerialist, who is actually a man, man! He posed as a woman to investigate this disappearance of his sister who was last known to be heading to this island.

Hearing voices, Miriam and the aerialist Phil climb down a trellis and follow their three companions being dragged into the woods.  Turns out Martinez has brought women here to hunt for sport — the second time in five stories that this trope has been used.  To prove his seriousness, he brutally tortures and kills one of the women.

The next day, exploring the estate, Miriam and Phil (dressed as Phyllis again) discover what became of the other women, and of Phil’s sister.  Whatever torture and nastiness goes on in this collection, you can usually depend on scores being settle at the end.

A pretty straight-forward tale

Post-Post:

  • First published in Mystery Novels and Short Stories Magazine, July 1940.
  • Also that month: The first successful helicopter flight.
  • Same publication as Mystery Novels Magazine or least original rip-off ever?  I have no idea.

The Shrieking Pool – G.T. Fleming-Roberts

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pulpfiction0125 stories for $.99; they must be great.  Part IV of XXV.

Reporter Larry Corrin is driving to Black Stool, er Pool.  For the 3rd time in four stories, a car gets stuck in the mud, or “bogged” as it is described.  Also for the third time in 4 stories, a person has been beckoned by a letter from an old acquaintance  Sadly, the hat tricks do not continue with a 3rd occurrence of naked women in chains.  Or in hats.

Corrin receives a letter from Dean Wile, owner of the Black Pool Lodge.  He says Black Pool has fallen into ill repute, what with the lake having developed an appetite for human flesh.  After Corrin’s car is bogged, he stumbles through the woods until he sees the lights of the lodge.

Before he even gets to the lodge, he sees a boat on the lake.  It is close enough so he can hear a man and woman talking.  Also close enough that he can see a reptilian head rise out of the water, and an taloned arm capsize the boat.  The woman makes it to the shore, but the man is killed by a talon to the head which obliterates his face.

The other members of the generically-named Jordan Scientific Institute rush outside to see what the commotion is.  Questions are raised as to why Bernice was out in the boat with Frank, who was not her husband.  Also why they would have gone out on the lake which is consuming people like popcorn.

Theories on the deaths range from drowning to the existence of a Brontozoum in the lake.  Corrin has a different theory, that a human is picking off the staff one-by-one.  That night, in the lake, he almost finds himself to be the next victim.  He does at least find the bodies of the missing men.  They are trapped in the undercurrent of the lake, the cold water preventing their rise to  the surface.  How this small lake managed to have an undercurrent is not addressed.

Naturally, the deaths turn out to be the result of a love triangle.  Either Corrin’s investigation got a few more of them killed, or he saved all the poor saps from going out into the lake one by one to die like the slowest lemming parade in history.  I really hate to see the plot require scientists to be such dolts.

After the lurid action in the previous story, this one seems a little flat.  I would never recommend it to anyone, but it is just fine as a story between tent-poles; and I’m optimistically expecting another strong one is coming, not trapping me in a literary lean-to.

If nothing else, this collection still owes me an ape for my $.99.

Post-Post:

  • First published in Mystery Novels Magazine, February 1936.
  • Hitler introduces the Volkswagen, designed by Ferdinand Porsche.

Fiancés for the Devil’s Daughter – Russell Gray

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pulpfiances0225 stories for $.99; they must be good.  Part III of XXV.  Sweet Jeebus, this is what I paid my $.99 for!

I was almost immediately derailed by this sentence which I had to read several times in order to make sense of it and the 1st-Person narrative that followed:

Helen, my wife, and I, Roland Cuyler, the author, and his wife Clara were standing near a window . . .

I was already intimidated that Kindle X-Ray said I had 18 characters to keep track of in this story.  It all worked out, though, and was a great read.

Literary agent Lester Marlin, and his wife are at a party where they spot an exotic woman enter who no one seems to know.  She manages to corner Marlin when his wife is chatting with an author.

Tala Mag — which would have been a great name on Barsoom — makes advances on him.  He blows her off thinking she just wants to use him to get published, and because he truly loves his wife.  The next day, he receives a note from his best client Portia asking him for a favor — to meet with Tala at Tala’s penthouse apartment.

She meets him wearing a blue negligee and nothing else; but also has a manuscript in her hand, so it is a business meeting.  He begins reading and finds it to be unspeakably vile and an offense to even his hard-boiled soul.  He tells her it is not publishable and prepares to leave when Tala calls her enormous servant Emil.

In no time, Emil has Marlin stripped and in chains.  Even in this position he will not submit to Tala.  In spite of the whip and the diaphanous negligee that is hanging open, he resists and fights back.  She tells him she has other plans for him, and he wakes up in the Warehouse District.

Some time later, having not learned his lesson, Marlin accepts an invitation from Roland Cuyler to spend a few days at his country home.  Marlin and his wife join four other couples from his literary circle.  Unfortunately, the invitation was a ruse by Tala Mag who is at the house with her goons Emil, Clops, Wick and Ringo (OK, I’m not sure the 4th was named).

What follows is both horrific and spoilerific, so be warned.  It really should be read to be appreciated.

I had no idea the WWII-era pulps got this brutal.  There is no hard-core sex, but there is a decent amount of torture and newdity.  As an example to the group, one woman is tortured to death with branding irons, and the effects on her body are maybe not graphic in words, but suggest some disturbing images in one’s mind — which is worse.  And by worse, I mean better.

This is only a prelude to the final act in which the women stripped naked and their husbands are forced to hunt each other’s wives for sport.  The men are issued guns that fire acid pellets.  In addition to the pain of being shot, the woman with the most hits / scars will be killed.

It is all pretty goofy, but would have made a good Russ Meyer movie.  You’ve got whips, chains, torture, and nude babes.  Really the only things missing are ape-men and Nazis to cover every trope.  Even if the other 22 stories are crap, I’ve gotten my $.99 worth.

Post-Post:

  • First published in Marvel Tales, May 1940.
  • Also that month: The first McDonald’s opened in San Bernardino.
  • How was this not the cover story?  That “Test Tube Monsters” must be incredible.
  • Everywhere else, this story is know as “Fresh Fiancés for the Devil’s Daughter.”

Mistress of Snarling Death – Paul Chadwick

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25 stories for $.99; they must be good.  Part II of XXV.

For the 2nd story in a row, a car is stuck in the mud.  I’ll say this for Global Warming, cars don’t get mired down in a drought.  Well, unless there used to be a lake there.  The unfortunate motorist this time is Stephen Demerest.

He has wandered lost among fields and deserted farms seeking help.  Finally he sees a young girl in a cloak.  He asks her the way to the Halliday house.  When she doesn’t respond, he approaches her, prompting six large black dogs to defend her by forming a circle.  Silently, she begins walking away and Demerest follows her; so the dogs are cool with stalking.

He finds himself at the door of the Halliday house and recalls the letter that Halliday sent to him.  It says their fathers were friends, and Halliday has no one else to turn to for help.  Demerest is to come to his house in the guise of a radio repairman, and be prepared to act when Halliday gives the signal.  For this task, Demerest has received $500.

All he recalls about Halliday is that he married well, but his wife took off, leaving him to raise their infant daughter.  The door is opened by a butler with hideous facial deformities —  a twisted mouth, one empty eye socket, broken teeth.

He is handed off to another equally grotesque servant, a squat gnome-like dwarf who takes him to Halliday’s bedroom.  There he formally meets Halliday and the couple attending to him, Eric and Nana.

Demerest soon learns that the couple is blackmailing Halliday.  They are dealt with through much shooting, running, fighting, flaying by dogs, tearing of night-clothes, and exposing of alabaster shoulders.

Halliday is afraid that in trying to shelter his beautiful daughter from attractive men who might lure her away, he has made her vulnerable to con-men like Nick.  Or Nana, if you get my drift.

He promises Demerest a princely sum if he will take care of his beautiful, virginal young daughter with the smoking body, and see that she meets some good man for love and marriage.  I think this will have the same outcome as putting Dick Cheney in charge of the 2000 VP search committee.

Another fun one.  Lots of grotesque figures, as they were called then — now, challenged or otherly-abled.  Plenty of action, and the occasional flashes of skin.  Sadly, no one was stripped naked and hung from a rafter like in Blood for the Vampire Dead.  But I guess that can’t be part of every story or it would get boring after 20 or so.

 Post-Post:

  • Published in Ace Mystery, July 1936
  • Also that month:  Lucky Luciano sentenced to 30-50 in the big house.

Blood for the Vampire Dead – Robert Leslie Bellem

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pulpfiction0125 stories for $.99; they must be good.

Despite the cover, there are no Apes, Sexfiends, Gangsters, Mad Scientists, or Tentacles in this story; not even a blimp or anything particularly politically incorrect.  Still, how can I complain about not getting my $.04 cents worth?

Tim Croft is a doctor whom the state has stationed in a rural Ozarks community.  I am not clear why the state is choosing where he should practice unless possibly he majored in rickets.

Late one night, Jeb Starko — from up at Haunted Holl’r — bangs on his door.  Starko claims the Ludwill clan is going to kill his wife Eula because they think she is a witch-vampire.  Eula is currently under the doctor’s care and Dr. Croft knows this is not true for 2 reasons.

Nurse Brenda comes out to see what the commotion is.  Someday she and Croft will marry, but for now she is rooming with the other nurse Edith.  Now we’re talkin’!

The Ludwills show up carrying “the inert form of a young girl, stripped stark naked and horribly pallid in the lantern glow.”  Croft is immediately taken aback as he did not get them anything.  Turns out that is Ludwill’s daughter, and he is accusing Eula of being a vampire, stringing his daughter up in the woods and drinking her blood.  Sure enough, she does have what appear to be fang marks on her neck.  Although, I prefer to think they were from necking with with Brenda and Edith.

pulpmegablood01

Not to nitpick, but she really is supposed to be naked based on the story.

Croft tells him that Eula is innocent.  And dead.  Unfortunately, this news news to her husband.  Ludwill can’t quite believe it either and asks to see her body.  They go to the hospital but can’t see her body because it is gone.  However, everyone does get a good look at Edith’s body as she has been stripped and hung upside down naked from a rafter.  She too has been drained of blood and has wounds on her neck.

That night Croft and Brenda try to flee the town, but get stuck in the mud.  Croft is knocked out and Brenda is gone when he awakens.  He goes to the Starko house and sees Eula sitting at a table before bowls of blood.  He then hears Brenda screaming in a nearby cave.  He finds the Ludwills have strung Brenda up as revenge.  During a fight, Starko enters the cave and attempts to puncture Brenda’s neck.

Croft grabs him and says, “You’re through killing girls for their blood!”  The doctor describes Starko’s motives and actions with Holmesian precision.  As justice was served, the doctor tells the Ludwills “I will not hold it against you for knocking me out and kidnapping my sweetheart.”  Yeah, and stripping her naked, hoisting her from a rafter, and using her as bait for a killer.  Bygones.  Do come over Wednesday night for Uno.

Post-Post:

  • Appeared in Mystery Tales, March 1940.
  • Also that month, Hitler and Mussolini meet in Brenner Pass to confirm their bromance.
  • Archaic words:  Eldritch — weird and sinister or ghostly.
  • Bellem is apparently best know for his creation of detective Dan Turner.  Good article here that makes me want to read more by him.
  • He also turned out dozens of scripts for some of the most popular TV shows in the 1950’s.